IGLAD was initiated by Daimler AG, ACEA and different research institutes and announced as a working group at the FIA Mobility Group in October 2010. Supported by FIA and ACEA, the goal of the group is to define a common standardized accident data set as an effective foundation for developing and measuring road safety policy endorsements and interventions. It shall also establish how this data set helps to achieve the goals of the “European Road Safety Action Programme” and the „Decade of Action for Road Safety“.

The first IGLAD working group meeting in March 2012 comprised a more detailed discussion on the common data scheme and steps necessary for a standardized data set. A common data scheme has been drafted and as a proof of concept, a pilot study has been conducted where each data supplier converted a small set of accidents into the current version of the common data scheme data. This should show the feasibility of the approach and give a small preview of the resulting data set that could be provided by the IGLAD project. The nine countries taking part in the pilot study were: USA, India, Germany, Sweden, France, Spain, Austria, Poland, and Italy.

By end of 2012, the basic project setup had been accomplished and first technical and organizational issues had been solved, so that the first project phase could be started. Target of phase 1 was to build an initial database with at least 100 cases per country. Phase 1 was funded by ACEA and finished in mid of 2014 resulting in a first dataset of 1550 cases from 10 different countries.

Phase 2 of the project started in 2014. From now on, the project was self-containing with an own project structure and funding model. A consortium agreement was set up that reflects the different roles of all involved parties. As there is no umbrella organization for this international project, an administrator was established who could care for the correct flow of data and financial resources. A steering group is responsible for strategic decisions and a technical working group cares about the maintenance of the database, scheme, codebook and related questions.

The interesting part of the organisational structure is on the member and data provider side. Members are parties that can buy data and data providers deliver data. Of course there are parties that are both at the same time, there are data providers that are owners of their data repository and there are data providers that act in the name of another consortium or even only recode other data. This leads to different constellations in terms of financial compensation. As IGLAD is non-profit and for research purpose, special attention has to be drawn on fair balance between the data providers and members. The corresponding funding model is shown below.

Other improvements compared to phase 1 was a simplified and unified data processing using the software Unidato as a common data acquisition tool.This allowed for extended automatic quality control using an extensive list of plausibility checks and streamlined the process of merging the data. There were also improvements in the codebook, the quality of sketches and some variables were added. The first data of phase 2 was released in 2015 containing 800 cases from 9 countries. The second dataset of phase 2 was released in 2016 with 850 cases from 9 countries. The third and last dataset of phase 2 is currently being prepared and about to be released shortly. It will contain 900 cases from 10 countries. This marks the end of the second phase, which was finished by the end of the year 2016 covered by the first conortium agreement. A new consortium agreement has been drafted with minor changes in the funding model and other parts and it is about to be signed by all parties of the consortium, ensuring the continuation of the project for another three years until 2019.